Posted
by
timothyon Sunday July 04, 2010 @04:46PM
from the just-gotta-be-different-don'tcha dept.

teh31337one writes "Four short months after Opera 10.50, the latest version of Opera's lightweight web browser has been released. It not only claims to be the fastest browser, but also the first final browser with WebM video support. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux."Update: 07/04 21:53 GMT by T: Headline updated to reflect that this is Opera 10.60, rather than 10.6. Thanks to the readers who spotted this goof.

I don't know who labeled you "troll"? "Ignorant" would have been more appropriate. Better yet, don't mod you down at all - I don't think people should be censored just because their opinions are unpopular.

- AdBlock is not an addon because it's built in- Opera has addons. Lots of them in fact.- No idea what QT4 is.- Try instant pageview - rather than forcing you to wait several seconds, Opera will display the partially-loaded page immediately. I wish Firefox had that feature.

Yea, the confusion of decimal version numbers. How often is Ubuntu 9.10 called Ubuntu 9.1, as another example? Windows 3.1 had decimal 10 as the minor version, while Windows XP (5.1) had decimal 01 as the minor version.

FYI, on my system the opera:about page shows it as version "10.60 internal", but its browser identification is:
"Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.60"
which could be construed as meaning either version 9.80 or version 10.60.

FYI, on my system the opera:about page shows it as version "10.60 internal", but its browser identification is:"Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.60"which could be construed as meaning either version 9.80 or version 10.60.

You can thank idiots who do browser sniffing the wrong way for that.

Basically, some people who should have never been allowed to do any development checked for Opera's version by the first digit. When Opera went to 10.00, some scripts suddenly thought it was Opera 1, and things went very bad. Therefore, all future Opera versions will fake-identify as "Opera/9.x" in order to prevent that from happening.

Chrome seems to be the next in line to hit version 10 by the way things are going, so I don't doubt they'll be in the same boat when it happens.

The right way is object detection using client-side JavaScript, but there are a couple cases where object detection fails. One of them is figuring out whether the mouse cursor position includes the scroll value or not [evolt.org].

Perhaps, but who cares? Let those sites break. Sites should display identically on every browser and adhere to all standards, not utilizing any browser qwirks. If they don't they are badly designed pages, plain and simple. It's not the browser's responsibility to compensate for an incompetent web developer.

Opera brags about this, but my experience is that it's generally quirky in comparison to other browsers (not IE) with valid (X)HTML/CSS. For instance, W3 specs say that a blockquote should be rendered with equal whitespace before and after (link here [w3.org]) , yet Opera won't give it any whitespace in a after the closing blockquote tag. This breaks the appearance of many sites, including imageboards.

Why should I care about a non-extensible browser that does some artificial benchmarks a millisecond faster? Not trolling, I'm trying to figure out what practical benefit Opera has for its users.

Tested on FF, Opera, Chrome, and IE8. The only difference in rendering the blockquote appears to be based on font and relative sizing, determining at which point the text wraps and how far over it is when it does so.

Opera 10.60 is still roughly twice as fast as Firefox 4.0b1, and less aggressive gobbling memory than either Firefox or Chrome (the hog) on average.

You generally only need extensions if something's already broken; on Opera, you can load up an ad blocking filter+CSS element hider, enable/disable both per-site, enable cookies/JS/etc on a per-site basis, and run many but-not-all user javascript. All of which require 'extensions' on Firefox.

It's also widely accepted to be the most standards compliant browser on virtually any comparative time frame, and also typically gives equal treatment to all supported OSes, so there are lots of reasons to use it and enjoy it.

People seem to like to complain about Opera, like they like to complain about XP x64. They heard about it once and so it just must absolutely be horrible, because giving it a real chance is too much work.

The last time I had any rendering/formatting problems was with old buggy javascript layout in 2006. Those were with Opera 9 beta(ish) I think? By 9.5 the problems (on minor, entirely non-public code) were gone again. And now (as in, for all of recent memory), like most browsers, you can report websites that don't work directly (and can post code snippets on the forums, IIRC).

Then explain how I can, with a single click, allow some scripts but NOT others and have it do so easy peasy? Because while Opera may indeed have some sort of adblocking (I've found since Opera is proprietary it is nearly all bad hacks) comparing its allow/disallow to NoScript is just a bad joke. And does their adblock keep ads from being downloaded, or just displayed? And no Proxies, because that isn't a tool for Opera, that is a bad hack that affects the entire OS.

Can you post some screenshots of this problem? I have never noticed it before. My suspicion is that you're using a proxy or some filtering software that's damaging the HTML that Opera is subsequently displaying.

Can you quote the exact parts of any specs that lead you to believe this is an error.

Obviously the two renderings are different, but that doesn't necessarily imply that Opera (or Firefox) is incorrect.
The HTML specification alone does not make many requirements on specific visual rendering, if you want specific visual rendering you need to also detail what CSS is being used. If Opera is not handling that CSS correctly then you have a bug, if it's default style rules are merely different from Firefox than

Given that blockquote is supposed to have line breaks before and after

Where is that specified? The fact you are talking about "line breaks" probably indicates you don't really know what you are talking about.
Block level elements may well have either "padding" and/or "margin" but certainly do not have "line breaks" before and after them as part of their formatting.

except when within td tags, it is a very obvious bug

Quite the opposite I expect, it sounds like a concious decision. I think it's reasonable t

For a long time it was the only browser to support border-radius CSS. It's currently the only browser with WebM support.
I like it because of its right click->Validate feature, which sends the cached copy of the current page to the w3 validator. Plus it also has Inspect Element (like Chrome), mouse gestures (like the Firefox addons), and it looks good in Mac OS X and Windows (although not so much in Linux). Plus Opera Unite is really cool too. Opera Mail is also pretty decent.
Also, I can't find in the spec where W3 recommends equal whitespace before and after blockquotes. All it says, as far as I can tell, is that it should be indented.

Plus it also has Inspect Element (like Chrome), mouse gestures (like the Firefox addons), and it looks good in Mac OS X and Windows (although not so much in Linux).

I really like Opera on Windows, but I find it dreadful on OS X. I like mouse gestures and use them regularly, but Opera only supports the mouse gestures built into Opera, not the system service ones that work in all my other apps. The same goes for the rest of the system services. No support for the native spellchecker or grammar checker or word statistics. No automatic language translation, dictionary/thesaurus lookup, or text manipulation services. If you give up all the cool OS supplied features of OS X,

There are system mouse gestures? Since when? Do you mean multitouch gestures?

OS X supports system services which can be installed by themselves or be supplied by an application. There are two different services available for OS X that can be used in pretty much all applications that use the Cocoa APIs, but won't work in Opera. So while I can use gestures in Opera, I have to configure them independently of all my other mouse gestures, which rather sucks.

. As for all those other services, I don't need a grammar checker (generally...), there is a spell checker built-in to Opera (which, again, I don't need)

Maybe you don't like grammar checking, but it's nice to have the option. As for spell checking, it's a lot less useful when it hasn't been trained with all the words I've taught the native spell checker. I meant really, why would I want to have to teach it twice that MSDP isn't a misspelling, and do the same for every other word? Why for the love of buddha can't it simply use the native spell checker offered to all apps?

Opera can send you straight to MW.com for dictionary/thesaurus or Wikipedia for encyclopedia

Right, but it can't use the native dictionary/thesaurus already installed on my machine, and which also goes to wikipedia and online resources all at once. Why does it have to be different and not behave the same as all the other native apps that aren't badly ported?

and I don't know what "text manipulation" services you're talking about; the ones that show up in the services menu for me are the same that show up in Safari's services menu.

I take it you haven't installed any services that operate on text, like something to fix those terrible line endings left by notepad, or to replace smart quotes with straight ones, or to automatically change a URL into a proper bibliography citation? I use them heavily, but last check they still didn't work at all in Opera.

I'm sure better Mac OS X integration will come in time; it already looks like a native Mac app. More so than Firefox, at any rate.

I put in feature requests to fix the problem, wow, forever ago. It just doesn't seem to be a priority there. It is too bad because I do like it on Windows. It's about the same as Safari on Windows, just not there.

I think you're missing the big picture. The Mac port of Opera is very poorly designed -- with lots of really minor issues which, all added up, make the experience of using Opera on the mac worse than even Firefox. Look at Chrome for a better port -- they made a lot of effort to ensure that Chrome blended in well with the Mac environment. The result is very good -- to the point that Chrome looks and feels like a native browser.

Opera has had a Mac port for a long time now, so filing a bug report about a minor issue like not using the built-in spellcheck seems pointless to me -- Opera seems to not care about the little issues which stands out like a sore thumb to people who have actually sat down and tried using Opera on the Mac.

So you're prepared to criticize Opera for their (allegedly) poor quality Mac port but aren't prepared to actually file a bug report or make any attempt to bring your dissatisfaction to their attention? Hell, you could have filed a bug report with Opera in less time then it took you to complain about it on Slashdot.

From some people's point of view, filing a bug report for a feature like using the built in spell check is like filing a bug report with Ford suggesting they add a glove box to the front of the vehicle. It's a feature that Mac users expect from a native Mac application -- if it's not there then many Mac users will just drag the app to the bin.

I do agree that people should file reports for bugs, but there are some types of bugs which shouldn't happen at all in a production release. The fact Chrome does prett

So you're prepared to criticize Opera for their (allegedly) poor quality Mac port but aren't prepared to actually file a bug report or make any attempt to bring your dissatisfaction to their attention?

While the previous poster may not have filed a bug report, I certainly did, almost a decade ago now. I filed several in fact. But they haven't done anything about the subject, so yeah, when someone says Opera for the Mac is great, I bring up where it is deficient. Maybe some of the developers will notice, or at least people will begin to understand why it has such low install share on the Mac.

Not trolling, I'm trying to figure out what practical benefit Opera has for its users.

The 80-20 rule, 80% of the benefit of Firefox with 20% of the effort fiddling with all the extensions. Firefox without any extensions at all is a poorer browser than Opera, and I got better things do to than to custom design my browser.

I'll bite.NoScript: disable scripting and enable it selectively using the F12 "site preferences" shortcut.AdBlockPlus: You can get various urlfilter.ini [fanboy.co.nz] if you really want to. I really dont need this, just block the most annoying ones with right-click:block_content. Some sites need the "normal" advertising, and once you block the top-10, you don't have much to complain about. Anyway, I will give you that point.Flashblock: Here [opera.com]. Myself I just "enable plugins" (F12 again) on sites I want. *And* you can block the flash content with the normal "block content" too.Firebug: Meh. Have you worked with dragon fly [opera.com]?RefControl: Hmpf. F12, disable "send referrer information". Maybe it is just me, but I never needed to spoof referrers.

And yes, I use every one of these extensions on firefox, because it is not there as default. And some more. In a *memory-limited VM* just so it does not goes haywire and swaps the hell out of my current apps to oblivion. Lucky me.

I'm trying to figure out what practical benefit Opera has for its users.

Of all browsers I've tried, it has the most customizable keybindings, and, in general, the single best implementation of keyboard-only browsing.

(Yes, I've tried the Firefox plugins which promised the same. They're not on par.)

On the whole, though, Opera doesn't have a single major killer feature. Rather, it's a combination of little (and obvious, come to think of it) things, each of which makes your life that much easier - and no-one else offers the entire set in one box. For example, Opera is the only browser I know of which lets you submit a form to a new tab, background tab etc (same keyboard modifiers when clicking submit button as for links).

Opera used to cost money. Then they switched to an ad-supported shareware model (no ads if you paid). Then they went free (as on $0) on the desktop and brought in the revenue by licensing to mobile phones, consoles, etc. That worked when smartphones were neglected and the only other option was IE mobile. But these days, WebKit is used by (or will be used by) pretty much everyone except Microsoft (who are on the verge of irrelevance). And Mozilla might, someday, gain traction with their mobile browser.

Who is going to pay for Opera when they can use WebKit or Fennec for free? They don't have the google ad revenue that Mozilla has. They don't have a sugar daddy like IE or WebKit.

It doesn't matter how good their browser is, their business model is dead and their days are numbered.

Yea, remember the race between Microsoft and Netscape where Netscape tried to make money off their browser at first, then MS used the money it made from Windows to make it's competitor IE free, then Netscape tried to make money off of web server software, and then MS in the same way make it's competitor IIS free?

They are actually growing (it's all int the financial reports); don't know/don't care much "why?", perhaps device manufacturers and telcos value what Opera offers after all. And with Opera as #1 mobile browser by worldwide usage (despite many of its users surely being rather cautious with number of sites visited / data transferred), the outlook doesn't look so bad - after all, they are doing fine despite being by far the longest without corporate daddy out of all major b

It's really pretty annoying. It's another one of those things that would have been great if just a wee bit more time and money had been put into it for polish. I mean imagine how cool it would have been to just go over to the mario corssover game on the wii and play it on nintendo hardware.

It's true; their days are numbered, and their attempts to do silly things like add webservers to their browser suggest that they know that very well.

Opera should be:

a) Open-sourcing their browser and making money from extras like T-shirts and manuals and other silly crap like that, which kids with browsers will buy.b) Working real hard on a totally new, advanced, streamlined, user-friendly browser for the semantic web.

The standards at Opera are way too high for amateurs and lots of code would be rejected for not being tight, not being CPU agnostic, not being platform agnostic, "breaks a feature which our partner needs", "not allowed within idea of Opera"...

Why don't you try to understand the idea behind Opera browser first? A tip for you: No developer who actually codes meaningful stuff for Firefox called Opera to open the source since they seem to have an idea why it is closed source.

It's true; their days are numbered, and their attempts to do silly things like add webservers to their browser suggest that they know that very well.

This is hilarious.

People like you have been predicting Opera's demise for 15 years. And for some reason, Opera is still around, and not only, that, but it's thriving. They just reported having more than 120 million users globally, up from 100 million a few months ago.

They're pulling in major deals with the likes of AT&T, Sony, Nintendo, Verizon, etc. a

Actually, they make the money exactly same way, every default search engine on Opera (which you can add more) makes money for Opera.

So, that is how they don't have to ask for money or display ads on browser. They also figured (a guess), more users mean more test and more compatibility and prestige for the real money making business which are devices.

There is nothing to beat Opera on devices, you can't pack Webkit and claim it is a mobile device brows

"Even when Turbo is enabled, encrypted traffic does not go through our compression servers. This means that when you are on a SSL site, we bypass these traffic and let you communicate with the SSL site directly."

Opera has slightly over 2% market share worldwide, but it varies very widely over various geographic regions. For example, it's mostly ignored in North America, is on the radar in Western Europe, is moderately popular in Eastern Europe, and is the single most popular browser in ex-USSR countries (yes, more popular than Firefox and IE, the next two after it).

I have opera installed on all my computers(FreeBSD and Windows) and was a huge fan of the browser. I find that every single web page I try to connect to, including Slashdot, takes forever to load. I have tried using the turbo option with no improvement. I have tested the same pages, right after trying to connect with opera and have found 100 percent improvement in connection and loading speeds. These pages include my bank, various media web pages, and several different forums I belong to.

I've switched my default browser from opera to chrome. I'm ready to uninstall opera, it's not worth trying to browse the web with right now. I have to go to FireFox on FreeBSD because chrome is not ported.

To be honest, I have. But everything I have read, and I did searches on chrome and FreeBSD is that nobody really had successfully made it work.

I'll be honest, I would rather get the Linux version of boinc to work then chrome. What is in the ports, boinc, does not allow you to run all the projects. Just Seti and a few that I don't participate in. The Linux version, if I could get it to work, would allow me to run all my boinc projects and completely move them off windows.

and I'm on the verge of changing browsers. I paid for Opera back when the choice was between IE, Netscape, and Opera. Been using Opera as my main browser, and very happy with it, since then... must be quasi 10 years now. I'm very sad to see Opera dropping the ball that bad, and not fixing it:

- basically, 10.x versions are much lower quality than 9.x and before. An occasional hiccup can be understood, but 10.x is kinda old by now, there have been several point releases, and the issues that bother me still are there.- broken feature 1: mouse gestures. One a large screen, with the mouse set for high velocity and high acceleration, mouse gestures don't register 9 out of 10 times. Chrome does not have that issue. It's probably kinda easy to fix (9.x has the issue, but not as badly).- broken feature 2: autoscroll. 10.x goes out of autoscroll after a (random) handful of seconds. I've taken to copy-pasting URLs of long documents into Opera 9x, but that's cumbersome.- broken feature 3: Opera Link keeps overwriting my main PCs bookmarks with stuff from PCs I haven't touched in ages. I'm back to synching bookmarks with backups and restore, and re-doing the rest (custom searches...) by hand.- broken feature 4: cursor in text boxes. I routinely have issues getting my cursor back into rich-text edit boxes. I actually had the problem right now, and had to click on my comment's title then tab back into my text... this is cumbersome after a while.- Broken feature 4: some sites that used to work perfectly no longer do. Hotmail is the main one, ZD sites are kinda screwy (the comments section)

I'm a bit disheartened. I've been a Opera fan and advocate for long, and now I feel they've dropped their focus on code quality to chase feature checklists and performance benchmarks. I personnaly don't care if my browser does WebM, or if it's 50% faster at javascript, if I can't use Hotmail, synch my PCs, scroll pages, and otherwise navigate with my mouse. These have been bugs since 10.0 beta, I've reported them, Opera hasn't moved on them.

I used to recommend Opera, I no longer do, and after enduring 10.x for months, I'm ready to leave, too. Chrome's mouse gestures and autoscroll work fine on my PC, as do Hotmail and text boxes...

How odd. I don't use mouse gestures, so I cannot speak to that one. As for the rest, I've never had autoscroll stop on me before. I've had some lag in it stopping when I wanted it to, though. Opera Link does seem to randomly take the older version, you're right there. Not sure that's part of the browser, and more the secondary service (not that it makes a functional difference, I'll admit).

Opposite problem with text boxes. It'll jump to them when a new page loads, even when there's lots of other content, so

Indeed that's weird, and it would feel better if the issues were the same for everyone. They aren't, but the buggy areas seem to be.

I just checked, I can use Hotmail with my 9.64-usb. WIth 10.x, I go into some refresh loop for a while after each page load, I have to click on random stuff for it to stop, sometimes after stopping it's usable, sometimes it's not and I have to refresh and retry.

I don't know about the flashblocker, since I have flash mostly off, and use a custom HOSTS file on top of that. I see

I think you should completely uninstall your current Opera installation, remove all traces of it, and then install and try again. The Mouse gesture problem was fixed backed in 9.5 or 9.6.. i can't speak for autoscroll, because I don't know what it is.. You can't really complain about Opera Link doing exactly what it's supposed to do, can you? Well, you did, but your complaint doesn't make much sense. You should probably either disable Link, or login to your Opera Link account, and edit the bookmarks there. Maybe your old PCs are in use somewhere, and are still updating the Opera Link, and you should get a new MyOpera account for your current browsers.

I've not had the "cursor in text boxes" problem on Windows, only on Linux, and it appears to be fixed for the most part in 10.60. Hotmail appears to work ok for me, although i have nothing but about 82,000 spams in an email box that i got back in 1998, and have never once used.

I'll try the uninstall reinstall. Never had the issue prior to 10.x though, and my 9.64-usb still works fine.

Autoscroll is: when you have a very long web page to read, middle-click, drag the mouse down a bit, the page starts scrolling down without you having to roll the scrollwhell nor click the verticla slider (very convenient), and should continue scrolling until you middle-click again, or move the mouse back up. Only it doesn't, and stops after 1-5 seconds.

I'll second the issues with Opera from upgrading. I remember having lots of problems with earlier versions of 10.x until I did a clean install (instead of upgrading from a 9.x install).

As for autoscroll, do you have a loose mousewheel perchance? If you move the wheel, it will stop the scrolling so if you have a loose one, it can do the same. Mine is getting a bit worn and has a few spots where it scroll without feeling that noticeable click.

I believe it is disabled when tabs are on the top because they spill over to title bar when on top (a la Chrome), so you don't really have any wasted screen estate there.

Now, for some reason, they've made it so that tabs don't spill into the title bar if the window isn't maximized (copying Chrome there again, I guess), but this can be changed - go to opera:config, and find "Chrome Integration Drag Area" option - this is the number of pixels from upper edge of the tabs to upper edge of the window - just set

Some annoyances like that here. Double-clicking on an empty page used to bring you to your home page. Doesn't do anything anymore. Flash is broken yet again (spinner forever), but I'm not sure I can blame that on them. I will anyway though.:) And putting in an incomplete address doesn't seem to automatically send you to the.com - e.g. type 'example' into the address bar. It'll do a search on 'example,' rather than taking you to example.com. Blah.

I haven't looked at the developer edition of opera however I think it still has a lot of catching up to do. I just gave it a run by opening it up and loading www.html5test.com and unfortunately for me I won't be using this to develop on.

Opera usage is calculated on usage, not downloads. For the desktop browser it's based on the number of users querying for an upgrade. So if you have turned off "automatically check for updates" you won't even be counted.

...and Firefox continues to be far superior as a general browser thanks to the available extensions.

For some this is awesomely true. For a lot of people, it's extra hassle to find, maintain, and sync them across their machines, plus there's potential for security risks and stability problems.

There is no reason for anyone to continue using proprietary browsers such as Opera or IE.

Opera has a better interface. It is more lean. It's a smaller download. For most people all the functionality is right there ready to go. It's less likely to be the butt of a security problem than the browsers with a bigger marketshare.